Alexa Robertson*

What’s Happened to Global News?

https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2020-0041Received November 1, 2020; accepted February 2, 2021

Abstract: Scholarship on “global journalism” – to the extent that the phenomenonis explored empirically – is often based on the analysis of national media. Thisarticle considers, instead, how the global fares in global newsrooms, andwhat hashappened to global news since the early years of the millennium. It is argued that,while much has changed in world politics and scholarly agendas, global news ischaracterizedmore by continuity than change, and that the interesting differencesare not between “then” and “now,” but between news outlets. The results of theanalysis of 2189 newscasts, 7591 headlines and 5379 news items broadcast over aperiod of 13 years by four global news organizations (Al Jazeera English, BBCWorld, CNN International, and RT) call into question assumptions about thecosmopolitan nature of channels said to speak to the world. They show that only asmall percentage of their news can be considered “global” in terms of topic andgeographical scope, although there are thought-provoking differences in how theglobal is narrated. Taken together, they provide occasion to revisit the scholarlydebate on global journalism.

Keywords: global journalism, global media, cosmopolitanism, Al Jazeera English,BBC World, CNN International, RT

Fifteen years ago, the state of global media studies had an optimistic hue.Admittedly, critical political economists continued to warn about the detrimentaleffects of media capitalism, and of “infotainment” pre-empting proper news(Thussu 2009), but a surge of interest in cosmopolitan outlooks in academia, andthe launch of connective media technologies like Twitter in everyday life, foundothers gazing with hope and enthusiasm into the communicative space theyenvisaged beyond the borders of the nation. Roger Silverstone wrote inspiringly ofthe “mediapolis,” a term intended to capture something both empirical andnormative, denoting the condition of media “in which relations between self andother are to be conducted in a global sphere.” There was eagerness to explore themediated space “in which the world appears and in which the world is constituted

*Corresponding author: Alexa Robertson, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University,Stockholm, 106 91, Sweden, E-mail: alexa.robertson@ims.su.se. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1675-7150

New Glbl Stdies 2021; 15(2–3): 303–322

Open Access.©2021 Alexa Robertson, publishedby DeGruyter. This work is licensed underthe Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

in its worldliness, and through which we learn about those who are and who arenot like us” (Silverstone 2007, 22, 31). On amore banal level, the authors of amuch-used textbook (then in its seventh edition) claimed that global news media wereplaying amajor role not only in informing the world, but in interesting people in it.After years of “looking inward” and ignoring news about the outside world, theauthors of The World News Prism noted, frightened and insecure citizens weretaking a serious interest in international affairs again. They were living in a muchmore global society, and international broadcasting had become “less propa-gandistic andmore informative and entertainment-minded” (Hachten and Scotton2006, ix–xi). Before long,media users theworld overwere not only being invited totake part in uprisings in Iran, Moldova, and the Arab world, co-present in time ifnot space, but also to use new media platforms to help pro-democracy activistsstymie state attempts to prevent news of dissent from getting out.

Reviewing news broadcasts and re-reading news reports from these years canbe a disorienting experience. Some things are familiar: Palestinian youths andIsraeli soldiers clash, people protest for and against migration, and the public iskept mindful of the threat of global warming, be it thanks to media access enjoyedby Gore (then) or Greta (now). In other respects, the news of 15 years ago can seemas contemporary as an episode of Madmen. The attention of journalists andscholars alike has shifted from the connective potential of social media to howthose very platforms enclose people in “filter bubbles,” insulating them fromothers and perpetuating misunderstandings rather than helping people encounterand learn about those who are different. It is no longer commonplace to read thattheworld has become amore global, single place or that people have becomemoreoutward-looking: indeed, there is much to suggest the opposite, with nationallycompetitive responses to a global pandemic, the US withdrawing, prior to theBiden presidency, from international agreements to halt climate change, the UKleaving the EU, and right-wing populists loudly questioning the benefits ofglobalization in country after country. Concerns about a surge in informationwarfare and reports of disinformation being planted inWestern outlets by Russiansources suggest that the authors of The World News Prism were overly hasty inconsigning propaganda to press history books.

The problem with claims made in such books, however, is not so much thatthey have been rendered obsolete. It is that they rest on shaky foundations, bothconceptual and empirical. While there is a substantial literature on foreign,international and transnational news reporting (Archetti 2019; Clausen 2003;Cottle 2009a,b, 2011; Hanitzsch and Hanusch 2012; Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011;Rantanen 2005; Reese 2008, 2010; Segev 2016; Wasserman 2011; Weaver andWillnat 2012), and on global journalism in nationalmedia (Berglez 2008, 2013; VanLeuven and Berglez 2016), the research gap yawns widely when it comes to

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systematic, comparative analyses of the output of television channels that marketthemselves as global, and that speak to audiences beyond state borders. Suchempirical engagement is necessary if we are to grasp what is global about globalnews, and to assess whether its globality has endured in the face of the de-velopments sketched above. The aim of this article is to show how this might bedone. To avoid the “snapshot” pitfall – the vulnerability of analysis that has itsstarting point in a particular moment in a rapidly evolving media-political land-scape – an answer to the question “what is global about global news?” is sought inroutine reporting over a period of 13 years. The contribution is partly methodo-logical (how dowe gain analytical purchase on the “global?”) and partly empirical(can generalizations bemade, or do answers to the question vary depending on thenewsroom?). The notion of “newsworld” is used throughout to designate thecanvas that forms the backdrop to tumultuous events, like the crises and proteststhat are the foci of many case studies, but also the quotidian events that flickeracross the screen on any given day; the depictedworld inwhich discrete events arenarrated and related. The results of the study presented in what follows show thatthe newsworlds of four global television channels differ in ways that could bethought tomatter to their audiences’understandings of problems shared by peopleeverywhere, and to conceptualizations of global news and “the global newsroom.”

Those news organizations are worthwhile objects of study not just becausethey are under-researched, but because they comprise a spectrum of financingsolutions and relations to political power. The corpus of 2189 newscasts, 7591headlines and 5379 news items includes the output of an MNC-owned newsroom,long invoked as the epitome of global broadcasting (CNN International); acommercially-funded channel moored in the public service tradition of a demo-cratic state (BBC World); one that is financed by the ruling dynasty of a monarchyin which political parties are not permitted (Al Jazeera English); and one bank-rolled by an authoritarian government that has increasingly become associatedwith the propaganda that Hachten and Scotton claimed was on the wane(RT, formerly Russia Today). The answers to three broad questions have beensought. First, how “global” is the newsworld of each channel? Second, what arethe contours of each of those newsworlds? And third, who populates them –whosevoices are audible in global news reports? Before venturing into those newsworlds,however, a brief tour of the scholarly terrain is in order.

1 Studying Global News Conceptually

The literature on communication in societies living under conditions of global-ization is littered with references to global, transnational, and international

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media, and to foreign news reporting. Upon closer inspection, these often turnout to be unhelpful at best and confusing at worse. Just as Ulrich Beck wrotethat we have become cosmopolitans “by default,” by virtue of living underglobalization, Hamada (2016) has written that “thanks to communicationstechnologies, no one can easily avoid the influence of global media” – whateverthat means. Both ideas make intuitive sense, until further thought shows them tobe vague or tautologous.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of looking at news flows underglobalization. One is optimistic. It sees in the work of journalists (as distinct frommedia technology) the potential to make connections between people separatedby distance and culture (Archetti 2019; Beck 2006; Berglez 2008, 2013; Chou-liaraki 2006; Cottle 2009a, 2011, 2019; Orgad 2012; Robertson 2010, 2015; Sil-verstone 2007; Tanikawa 2019a,b; Wasserman 2011). As Halsall (2006, 8) put it,global media have the power “to enable the human being to imagine the world asa whole.” The other way of looking at global news is more skeptical. Scholarssuch as Thussu (2009), Herman and McChesney (2001), McPhail (2014), andothers working within the political economy tradition, have looked out into theglobal mediascape and seen news outlets driven by the profit-seeking agendas oftheir corporate owners, with a resultant proclivity to ply audiences with enter-taining fare rather than the information required of citizens struggling to makesense of a complex world. Having dominated the literature on global media formany years, such accounts have been joined more recently by scholars whosebrows are furrowed for other reasons. They discern a need to study news de-pictions of global issues from the perspective of soft power, propaganda, andstrategic narratives because of state behavior and because “the increasinglyinterconnected world has affected the ability of groups and individuals to claimactorhood and attempt to set out narratives that may challenge or supportdominant (and traditional) elite narratives” (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, andRoselle 2013, 41). Seen in this way, the relevant currency is ideas rather thanmoney, as they can change the information contexts in which states make pol-icies. “Central to this ability is, of course, the ability to communicate acrossnational borders” (ibid). Waisbord (2013, 132) had a point when he observed thatmedia globalization is “a Rorschach blot of scholarly debates about contempo-rary dynamics and trends.”

Given that blot, what do people have in mind when they write about globalnews? According to Clausen (2003, 87), it is homogenous news that is usuallyabout global topics (something she does not define) aimed at audiences around theworld that are conceived of as communities with common interests in things likethe environment or football. This is in essence what Grieves (2012) has in mindwhen writing of “transnational journalism.” Others argue that global news is not

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homogenous at all, but varies according to what corner of the global village anewsroom is situated in. Writing at the same time as Clausen (2003), Lee et al.(2003) argued that the output of channels like CNN was inherently ethnocentricand state-centered. Dencik found evidence of this in the BBCWnewsrooma decadelater. The editorial practices she observed were situated in “a specific culturalcontext,” with news values shaped by perceptions of the global public interest“rooted in an understanding of news and newsworthiness that has developedwithin a specific political, institutional and journalistic culture” (Dencik 2013, 9).That culture was British, not global. Similarly, Hafez argued a decade ago thatglobal journalism did not yet exist: there were “at best, various zones of trans-nationality, a western, an American, a European, Muslim, Arab or whatever”(Hafez 2011, 486–87). Brüggemann and Wessler (2014, 403) expressed similarskepticism. “In a globalized world” they wrote – despite the uprisings known asthe “Arab Spring” having recently caught the interest of peopleworldwide – “thereis no reservoir of cross-culturally shared values that event organizers, media, andaudiences can easily activate to make sense of a specific event.”

The more optimistic Berglez found global journalism happening in nationalnewspapers. As he defined it, global journalism had a particular epistemology,defined as the “global outlook:” instead of putting the nation in the center of theframe, it sought “to understand and explain how economic, political, social andecological practices, processes and problems in different parts of the world affecteach other, are interlocked, or share commonalities” (Berglez 2008, 847; see alsoOlausson 2013). Understood in this way, global journalism has to do with aparticular kind of knowledge that originates in the mode of journalistic expla-nation. More recently, Tanikawa (2019a, 145) has also conceptualized globaljournalism in epistemological terms – as a sort or system of knowledge. For bothof these authors, fulfilment of the criterion of global journalism is not achievedsimply by journalism changing the object of reporting, “from nation-centeredevents to globally connected occurrences.” This would be changing the subjectmatter but not type of journalism. “If a journalism is said to have transitionedfrom the ‘national’ outlook to the ‘global’ outlook, it implies a change in thejournalists’ system of knowledge upon which reporting is based” (Tanikawa2019a: 1425; Brüggemann and Wessler 2014).

There are two problems with this. The first problem is that it is assumed, butnot explained, why subject matter does not count towards a global credential.News consumers can hardly be expected to develop a global outlook ifthey encounter only national news. And media scholars face an impracticableworkload if there is no readiness to look for insights in the documentation of the“what” and an insistence on only evaluating the “how,” which is methodologi-cally much more difficult and time-consuming and renders general conclusions

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unattainable. The second problem is that such conceptions of global journalismassume a linear development. As globalization becomes more entrenched and asjournalists become aware of that entrenchment, journalism will change andbecome more “global” over time, according to this line of reasoning. Butglobalization is far from being an even process – not just in its spread, but also inits discursive incarnation (i.e. as something we imagine as well as somethingthat impacts in practical and tangible ways on daily life). Even by the timeTanikawa was writing, in 2019, it had becomemore of a contested concept than itwas when the “battle of Seattle” raged during the anti-WTO protests of 1999.Global journalism – to the extent that it exists – cannot be assumed to have anupwards trajectory. It could as well be a question of fits and starts, or cycles withmore “global” peaks andmore “national” troughs, in keeping with the prevailingmood or concerns of the times. The trajectory should thus be treated as anempirical question rather than an assumption, which is why the study reported inthis article has attempted to see how the global fares on an everyday basis, over aperiod of more than a decade – from 2008, before the global financial crisisstruck, to 2020, the year of a global plague.

Instead of setting the conceptual bar high while keeping the empirical barlow (building arguments on the backs of national newspaper content, as Berglezand Tanikawa do), what if we instead considered the output of newsrooms thatdefine themselves as global broadcasters and who produce news for audienceseverywhere? Rather than “zones” in which news has a certain inflection, thepoint of departure for the study reported here is that it can be fruitful to seek tounderstand the work of specific actors or organizations – such as BBCW or AJE orRT or CNNI – and to pay attention to how journalists approach the task of“reporting the world back to itself” (as AJE put it in an advert broadcast during itsfirst week of operations) and of deciding who “the world” is. Surely journalistsworking in global newsrooms should be able to move beyond what Wasserman(2011) terms “old categories of national, international, foreign or domestic” anddo this work differently, more naturally? At the same time, are such categoriesnot actually perpetuated by scholars? How easy is it to move beyond them whenstudying news content? Not very, as it turns out.

Some arguments about media globalization, sighsWaisbord (2013, 133), “areassertions and hopes without sufficient empirical evidence.” Similarly, but lesscolorfully, Dencik (2013, 4) notes the lack of substantive empirical work on theshift to the global in media studies. In so doing, she echoes observations madeover a decade ago by Cottle and Rai (2008), when they argued that there is acommunicative complexity in the different structures that routinely delivertelevision news, and that this has gone largely unrecognized and unexplored.The next section sets out the methodology developed to help fill the research

308 A. Robertson

gap – to explore the communicative architecture of different global newsrooms,sizing up their contours in terms of the topics their newsworlds are built with, andthe voices of those who inhabit them.

2 Treating Global Journalism as an EmpiricalQuestion

One of the things Cottle and Rai drew attention to when developing their idea ofcommunicative complexity was “the distinctive phenomenology of live 24/7broadcasts,” with their program flow, cyclicality and fetish for live news. Thefetish is not just a journalistic one, but has also been shared by scholars who havebeen “transfixed on this experiential ‘live’ quality” of television news (Cottleand Rai 2008, 162). The problem with this preoccupation is that it has obscuredthe routine, quotidian structures complicit in the packaging of the world forglobal as well as national audiences. By analyzing news output on a weekly basisacross a period of 13 years, months, this study interrogates precisely such routinestructuring.

The sample was comprised of one broadcast by each channel, every week, inthe period from 15 September 2008 to 30 June 2020, with the exception of 2010 (forpractical reasons). While every effort was made to use the same programsthroughout the period under investigation, it proved difficult. The channelscontinually change their schedules (often without notice), replacing an advertised30-min bulletin with a 60-min one, and vice versa. The moments in the news cyclestudied here (one evening news program, broadcast at European primetime oneday each week over the 13-year period) are nevertheless reasonably faithfulreflections of Cottle andRai’s structures, it could be argued. They can be thought ofas the equivalents of the first shaft in the archaeological excavation of a mound.The preliminary probe does not replace theworkwith the sieve and fine brush (thishappens at the stage of discourse or narrative analysis), but it does serve a usefulsurveying function, giving an indication of where would be good to dig moredeeply, to expose the structures of mediated strategic narratives (see Robertson,Chiroiu, and Ceder 2018; Robertson, Chiroiu, and Grecu 2018).

The results presented in what follows were generated from the coding oftwo samples. The first was comprised of the headlines of broadcasts from 15September 2008–30 June 2020 (“headlines”). One day per week was chosen andthat day varies through the 13-year period. The second sample included the entirecontents of the Monday broadcasts for two of those years: 2011 and 2015

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310 A. Robertson

(“items”). Table 1 shows the distribution of primary source material, across yearsand channels.

Headlines were coded for several reasons. One is that such simple primarysource material allows for the efficient analysis of an unusually large corpus, witha high degree of inter-coder reliability. Another is that many viewers catch theheadlines and little else. They are repeated at regular intervals throughout the 24/7news flow and it is reasonable to expect they will leave a more lasting impressionthan the rest of the program on people not giving the news their full attention, orwhere the television is on in the background. Headlines, moreover, are an easilydocumented measure of news values, provide a lot of verbal and visual informa-tion about newsworlds, and contain evidence of frames (RT stands out in thisrespect).

Apart from the headline analysis, more labor-intensive coding of completebroadcasts (i.e. of the individual news items)was conducted to getmore detail, andin particular to obtain a comparative overview of the voices used by the differentnewsrooms (apart from those of their own journalists) to tell the stories of whathappens in their worlds.

How “global” is the newsworld of each channel? The point of this first broadquestion was to see whether the different channels paint pictures of a worldcomprised of states or one constituted differently, and whether or not thedepicted worlds are characterized processes and problems that spill overnational borders. A “global” checkbox in the codesheet was ticked if a headlineor news item related to a global issue (such as terror, a pandemic, environmentalor refugee crisis); if it was framed in global terms (e.g., “the world came one stepcloser to winning the battle against COVID-19 this weekwhen… ”); if it was aboutthe foreign affairs of an intergovernmental organization (such as the EU, ArabLeague or African Union) or the actions of NATO or the UN (such as a GeneralAssembly meeting) or about the UN taking a stance for cosmopolitan principles(such as international law); if it concerned the actions of the InternationalCriminal Court; or if it was about a global diaspora (e.g., “Muslims throughout theworld have taken to the streets to show their outrage over the decapitation of aFrench schoolteacher … ”). This way of coding for global news is referred to inwhat follows as “global-as-issue.”1

1 The “global” option was not selected if the news was about the position of a specific state orstates within an international government organization (e.g., “Mexico’s contender for the IMFpresidency” or “Turkey says it will participate in NATO operations in Libya”); if the lead-in of anitem was “global” but the story itself was local (“The WHO has issued new warnings about thespread of ebola. Here in Britain, the Scottish nursewhowas infected is recovering in hospital”); if aglobal crisis was framed in a local context (“There is conflict in the RepublicanParty over PresidentTrump’s announcement of new troop deployments in the war on Taliban terror”); or an IGO was

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Beginning with this question means beginning with the most difficult codingof all the results presented here. The coding criteria for the “global checkbox”were reviewed continuously over the course of a year by members of the codingteam, as newly occurring examples prompted re-evaluation. On more than oneoccasion, the temptation was to abandon the attempt to code this category, but thechallenges involved were more interesting than the frustrations, so it was decidedto persevere.

The second question – what are the contours of each newsworld? – waseasier to operationalize and code for, and lent confidence to the endeavor ofdocumenting the “global.” It was answered with the help of three sub-questions.How “big” was the world of each channel in the investigated period, i.e. howmany different countries featured in the headlines and news items? Given thatthe literature on international news has long assumed the dominance of theWestin general, and Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, and that news outletschallenging that hegemony have promised to report regions of the world ignoredby the mainstream, another sub-question enquired as to which countriesoccurred most frequently. Here, coders chose from a list of officially recognizedstates, tweaked to include a number of additional options, found necessary inorder to capture the nature of the reports. One of these was, again, “global,” thistime referring not to the nature of a topic but to the location of the event. Theglobal option in the “country list” was selected in the case of inter-regional orworldwide involvement, if two or more regions from different continents wereinvolved, or more than five countries from at least two different continents.Coders could make up to three selections.

The question of whose voices were heard in global news broadcasts wasanswered by coding all the actors who spoke in the news items in the secondsample. People who were seen but not heard were not coded, partly for reasonsof feasibility, and partly because speaking actors have, at least potentially, apower of definition that silent actors do not. As with the topics, and for the samereason, a rather detailed list of 30 “speaking actors” was used, with resultscollapsed at a later stage of analysis. For each person who spoke in a news item,up to two roles on the list could be chosen. The gender of the speaking actor wasalso noted, whether they spoke English or were dubbed, and whether or not theywere identified by name. This is particularly interesting when it comes to thenarrative use of “ordinary people”: are they anonymous and unidentifiable, ortreated with the same respect as government members? Previous research

only mentioned in a report about something else. World sporting events, Oscars and Nobel prizesand news about spacewere consigned to a “can’t be coded thisway” category, as they could not becoded faithfully as either national or global concerns.

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(Robertson 2010, 2015) led to the expectation that there would be significantdifferences between the channels, such as more elites in the BBC newsworldand that the “voiceless” (protesters, refugees, and ordinary people) would speakmore often on AJE.

Using a bespoke coding database, a team of 20 coders of 14 nationalitiestook turns analyzing different channels and periods, to facilitate comparability,and avoid becoming exclusively immersed in one newsworld. The raw datarecorded in the database was subsequently treated in SPSS, where the resultswere summarized in simple measures to answer the three broad questions guidingthe study.

So how “global” is the newsworld of each channel? The simple answer, ittranspires, is: not very.

As can be seen from Figure 1, there are few ups and downs when it comes tothe “global” dimension of global news, apart from a 2011 RT peak (a reflection ofthe Russian outlet’s keen interest in dissent in the outside world), an uptick forAJE in 2014 (when the “voiceless” in Ferguson and Hong Kong shouted audibly)and for all channels in the COVID pandemic year of 2020. The proportion of globalnews in global newscasts, when calculated on the basis of the coding of 7591headlines, is between 7.6% (CNNI) and 9.2% (RT), when the results for all codedyears are averaged. AJE’s average of 8.9% places the Doha-based channel behindRT, followed then by BBCWwith 8.2%. Thefirst sixmonths of 2020 stand out, withan average of 18% global headlines, when all channels are counted. Out of thefour channels, AJE leads significantly, with 23.5% of its headlines being global(by far the highest percentage throughout the period). CNNI tops the ranking inthe last three months of 2008, with 14.3% of its headlines being global. RT has asimilar leading score in 2011 (15% of its headlines were coded as “global”) and in2012 ranks first with 10%. In 2013 and 2015 it was BBCW that had the highest share(10% both years), while AJE had more than twice as much global news in their2014 headlines than either BBCW or CNNI (12% compared to 5 and 4%). In 2016,AJE had the highest share (9%, followed by RT at 7%) while the share in allchannels dipped to around 6% in 2017. RT takes the lead again 2018 and 2019,scoring close to 12% global headlines both years.

The top of the broadcast is, of course, only part of the picture. Could it be thatthe paucity of global news in the headlines is a reflection of the fact that globalissues are complex, requiring more explanation in longer pieces farther down inthe broadcast, and have to do with processes rather than the dramatic events andbreaking news that make the headlines? If so, the coding of the news itemsthemselves, and not just the headlines, should yield different results. They do, as itturns out, but the share of global items in the broadcast as a whole is notimpressively higher. Asmentioned above, the second sample comprised the entire

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Monday broadcasts of two years (2011 and 2015). In this sample, which is smaller interms of newsdays, but not units of analysis (5379 items were coded), BBCW’sfigure goes from an average 7% in the headlines to 9% in the items, CNNI’s from 6to 10%, and RT’s from 8 to 12%. The figure for the proportion of global news in AJEremains unchanged, at 8%.

Do these figures faithfully capture the nature of the studied news output, or arethey a methodological artifact? To make sure, the second question looked forglobal news in a slightly different way, by sounding out the contours of thedifferent newsworlds. It revealed more similarities, but also some interesting dif-ferences between the channels.

As all of the channels in this study have a global remit, and purport tospeak to viewers everywhere, it seemed pertinent to ask how big their worldmapsare. A first answer to this question was sought by establishing how many coun-tries feature in the headlines in the sample (“how big is the world of eachbroadcaster?”). Do the tops of the programs reflect the fact that the world iscomprised of 194 countries (depending on how one counts)? As can be seen fromFigure 2A,B, the AJE newsworld is consistently the biggest, and CNNI’s is alwaysthe smallest (a position shared, for some years, with RT). By the end of thesampled period, BBC’s World had shrunk somewhat. What Figure 2A,B did notshow is the finding – perhaps unsurprising – that the US is always in the top threemost frequently mentioned countries in the headlines of all the channels.

Figure 1: Howmuch does “global” news figure in the newsworlds of the four global channels inthe study? The lines indicate the percentage of headlines coded as dealing with “global” issuesin the broadcasts of Al Jazeera English (AJE), BBC world news (BBCW), CNN international (CNNI),and RT (formerly Russia Today), 15 September 2008–30 June 2020.

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Who populated the newsworlds of the different channels? The results ofcoding done using an extensive list of actor categories can be collapsed underdifferent headings depending on the need of a given analysis, and what previousresearch leads us to expect. For example, in a study of protest reporting, the actorcategories were grouped under the headings of elites, law-and-order, civil society/protester and non-elites. When global news is in focus, other groupings are moreinteresting. Elites remain for obvious reasons, but given that global problems havethe greatest impact on people whose jobs are threatened by the worldwidefinancial crisis, whose lives are threatened by a pandemic, terrorism, or politicalviolence, whose homes are destroyed in the wake of climate-change-relatedextreme weather, and who have been forced to flee for sanctuary in other conti-nents and countries, of more interest to the present study is how often the voices of“ordinary people”, and ordinary people in special circumstances, such as refu-gees, were heard in global news reports.

When the 30 actor categories at the disposal of coders are collapsed into asmaller number of thematic ones – elites, civil society, ordinary people and refu-gees – the similarities between the channels, when it comes to whose voices areheard in global news reports, are striking. The elite category accounts for 77%of allspeaking actors coded in CNNI, 75% in RT, 73% in AJE and 71% in BBCW. In adistant second place are “ordinary people” in CNNI (19%), BBCW (12%) and AJE(11%). In AJE, civil society ties for second place, and it is second in RT (14%). Civil

Figure 2: (A, B) How big are the newsworlds of the four global channels in the study? The size ofthe rings is basedon the number of countries appearing in theheadlines in 2009and2019 inAJE,BBCW, RT, and CNNI. Beside the name of each channel is the number of countries mentioned atleast once in the broadcasts of the respective channel.

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society is in third place in BBCW (9%) and CNNI (2%). “Ordinary people” are inthird place in RT (10%), a position occupied by refugees in AJE (5%).

But the large collective categories hide some differences between the chan-nels. For the purposes of Figure 3, “experts” have been extracted from the categoryof “elites” and pictured separately. Displaying the results in this way highlightssome interesting things. AJE, which claims to give “a voice to the voiceless” does,but only to a limited extent. (The results are different when the sample is newscoded as “involving protest” rather than “global,” but that is another story, seeRobertson, Chiroiu, and Grecu 2018). When attention is turned to the frequency ofindividual actor-roles, rather than the larger thematic categories illustrated by thehands in Figure 3, it transpires that AJE’s most frequently heard actor is a globalone – a member or representative of an IGO (14%). In CNNI, it is a national actor:head of government (19%). In both BBCW (14%) and especially RT (30%) the mostfrequently heard actor is the expert. Perhaps the most striking result, however, isthe extensive use of “experts” in RT to narrate stories strategically (see Robertson2017; Robertson, Chiroiu, and Grecu 2018 formore on this trait). There is more to besaid and studied about voice, but visibility and point of view are equallycompelling foci, so merit a few words as we consider the way forward.

Figure 3: Speaking actors in the news items coded as “global” in theMonday broadcasts of AJE,BBCW, CNNI, and RT, 2011, and 2015. The percentages are based on the total number of“speaking actors” for each channel (excluding the reporter).

316 A. Robertson

3 Global Outlooks

For some scholars, global journalism is “conceptually congruous with thecosmopolitan conception of journalism” (Tanikawa 2019a, 1425). And indeed, itcould be said that Berglez’s “global outlook” is, in essence, what Beck (2006) hadin mind when he wrote of the “cosmopolitan outlook”. This is contrasted with“counter-global” use of stereotypes and domestication strategies, a “prevalent”reporting style in which a national figure or product is a central feature in a foreignstory (Tanikawa 2019b, 923). But why should this be thought of as counter-global?Are such strategies now part of the task that Berglez and Tanikawa set journalists –the drawing of connections between there and here, between the global and thelocal – as opposed to treating things as foreign? Is this not part of the discursiveconstruction of globalization – the ability to imagine “global” things as being closeto home and one’s own lifeworld?

To imagine global things, they need to be rendered visible. More than that: theviewer should be given an opportunity to see them from different vantage points.The question of determining where the line is to be drawn between recognizingdiversity and perpetuating stereotypes is far from simple, and merits a discussionof its own, but two examples can prove illustrative. They return us to Silverstone’smediapolis.

Comparing how the four channels in this study reported the global refugeecrisis in 2018, Robertson and Schaetz (2019) found that different global newsroomsreported the crisis in different ways – ways that offer different answers to thequestion of what might be a “proper distance” to strike towards others, and whothose others might be. The differences between the approaches are mostly visiblewhen juxtaposing CNNI and AJE reporting, which the quantitative results pre-sented above also indicated had the smallest and biggest newsworlds. Even whenpurporting to speak to the world, CNN is clearly aligned to the “emergence,constitution and reproduction of collective (national) identities” (Hänska 2018)while the AJE could be thoughtmore conducive to the cultivation of global (Berglez2008) or cosmopolitan (Robertson 2010) outlooks, as highlighted by reporting onWorld Refugee Day 2018.

CNNI’s Hala Gorani ended the broadcast that day by reminding viewers thatthe migration crisis is a global problem. The images “we” have been seeing at theU.S. border, she tells viewers, are not unique to the Americas: Europe is alsostruggling with its biggest refugee crisis since World War II. The problem as sheframes it is one experienced journalists and their audiences, rather than the peoplefleeing persecution and death. “The scale of trauma and devastation that it hascaused is simply too great for any one of us to comprehend fully,” she says to the

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camera. “In fact, that’s why we often home in on one particular story, oneparticular face, because it feels like the only we can begin to relate is to do that.”Gorani speaks then of a “different approach” to the problem taken by another newsorganization. “Look at this!” she urges viewers, holding up a printed copy of thatday’sGuardian newspaper. Noting that the text “maybe too small for you to read athome” she explains that it contains the name and cause of death of every singlemigrant who has died trying to reach Europe since 1993. “It’s this type of thing thatI think brings home, because the scale of it– you see how thick it is [she holds up thenewspaper] brings home the magnitude of the crisis, as Europe continues to try tofind a way to respond to it.”

Despite her obvious outrage at nationalist policies and empathy for peopleexperiencing a global crisis, and her direct appeals to viewers “at home,” Goranidoes not invite those viewers to see the migration crisis from a position that is nottheir own. In contrast, as the CNNI anchor was holding up a newspaper replete withthousands of tiny words, too small to see at home, rather than faces and voices, AJEwas taking its viewers down from what it calls the “high helicopter” view to visitAfghan refugees in Thessaloniki (“These people are trapped and they’re living likedogs. In the absence of any coherent European policy…this is the human result”),Syrian refugees in Turkey (“Ahmed’s situation shows someof the complex problemsthat bedevil the lives of about four million people who fled the war in Syria”), arescue ship steered by the Spanish captain who saves people drowning in theMediterranean (“It is the greatest satisfaction you can have, when you rescue peo-ple”), and the camp home of a Rohingya who has fled to Bangladesh (“The groundhas literally collapsed beneath Mohammed’s feet.”). The “others” in AJE stories ofmigration are not “illegals” or “swarms ofmigrants”: they are squabbling politicianswho deny people the right to have rights and who make it difficult for civil society,and for ordinary people with whom viewers might identify, to do the morally rightthing. In so doing, a discursive connection is formed between “ordinary people” infar-flung places (Robertson and Schaetz 2019).

The second example is also from Al Jazeera English, and also involves“others,” and the rendering of the invisible visible. A series called SurprisingEurope, broadcast on television and on AJE’s website and YouTube channel,explores European society using a unique rhetorical technique. All the reportersare undocumented Africanmigrants, whose stories reverse the gaze andwho bringthe viewer close to other migrants, in their bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, andmusic rooms. The reports are framed using visual metaphors of connection anddisconnection – stairs and escalators with Africans going up and down; water,bridges, and boats suggesting connections (bridges bring people and placestogether) and, conversely, asylum-seekers depicted as being “at sea,” both literallyand metaphorically. This “type” of reporting, to use Berglez’s phrase, comprises

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practical applications of Silverstone’s idea that global media provide a space inwhich to encounter the Other. This is to say that, while it has been argued thatBerglez and Tanikawa are setting the bar high, they are also onto something.Narratives circulating through global newsrooms like AJE provide more sophisti-cated imaginative tools than acknowledged by those who study communicationflows from a perspective of critical political economy.

4 Summing Up the News

The answers to the three broad questions posed at the outset – how “global” is thenewsworld of each channel, what are the contours of those worlds, and whopopulates them? – showed that, on a denotative level of analysis, there are strikingsimilarities between newsrooms moored in quite different political and institu-tional settings, and financed in quite different ways. The most obvious, andperhaps disheartening one, is how little “global”news there is in global newscasts.But analysis has revealed differences aswell, that could be thought tomatter to theway viewers conceive of problems shared by people everywhere.

Hafez claims that many countries never, or hardly ever, occur in the newsbecause they are not deemed newsworthy. “The limitation of the world in themainstreamnews to tiny bits of event-centred information,” hewrites, “leads to anenormous fragmentation, de-contextualization and a dangerous loss ofcomplexity” (Hafez 2011, 485). The results presented in this article indicate thereare problems with generalizations like these. Some broadcasters make room forsignificantlymore countries in their newsworlds than others. AJEmade roomat thetop of its broadcast for news about 67 of the 195 countries in the world in 2019,which is not what Hafez says. His claim is more convincing when CNNI and RT areused as evidence.

Thussu (2009) used the phrase “CNNization” to describe how the outputof global 24/7 channels had become “sensationalized and trivialized through high-tech reporting.” While RT does have a penchant for the sensational, the personwho watches AJE and BBCW on a regular basis is not likely to be struck by thetrivial. High-tech reporting is also less noteworthy than the jerky footage shot by acameraman following a correspondent through a conflict zone or the grainyfootage often, and not entirely accurately, referred to as “amateur video” or UGC.This matters to scholars like Pantti (2013, 201–2) who argues that such eyewitnessimages from distant events could “contribute to the ‘world openness’ forged fromencounters of the local with the global.” These impressions await closer scrutiny atthe sieve-and-fine-brush stage; it is work beyond the scope of this preliminaryexcavation.

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A quarter of a century ago, Nick Stevenson opined that the transformation of themedia was one of the most important changes facing global societies, with the spatialflows of satellite broadcasting putting people in touch with the lives of others they hadnevermet,andstretching theoutlinesof their communities (Stevenson1999).Reviewingthe literature on international communication back then, he noted the existence, on theone hand, of polemics with little evidence and, on the other, documentation of inter-esting features of the field with no explanation. This study does not really match eitherdescription, but is admittedly more documentation than explanation. It has beenconducted in the conviction that such documentation is a necessary first step in thestudy of maps of meaning.

A study of news content has limitations. The superficial coding of the “what”produced some insights into the extent towhich global newscasts contain global news.But coding the “how” – the framing of the news stories themselves, the way thenarratives are structured – is needed to complete the picture. Previous research hasshown that quantitative and qualitative analysis of such reporting can yield substan-tially different results (Robertson 2010), and it is in the telling of the news stories, ratherthan their content, that the discursive connections are made in which global meaningcan be made and, perhaps, cosmopolitan outlooks fostered.

There are other limitations to analysis of content. Empirically-supportedexplanations of the differences found in the analysis presented here can only beprovided by production studies, forays into the newsroom and interviews. Thesignificance of the content can only be established by studies of audience recep-tion (which in the case of global publics are a challenging endeavor, to say theleast) or studies of policy change (no less daunting, if any causality is to beinferred). This article thus requires no adjustment by Stevenson to his 1999 con-clusions, in the absence of explanation and disinclination to polemic. But it doesbring new evidence to the table. It calls into question the cosmopolitan nature of atleast some channels that purport to speak to the world, and cautions againstgeneralizations about the “global newsroom.”While further engagement with thenarrative frames, as well as basic features, of global news broadcasts is needed, itis evident that even outlets that call themselves global rely heavily on nationalborders, even if only discursively.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Luiza Chiroiu for her invaluablecontribution, involving, among other things, running the descriptive statistics onour data and collating the results. Coding assistancewas provided byDiana Grecu,Ola Lopatynska, Nadja Schaetz, Aleksanda Galus, Clarie Åkesson, April Lin, MaxMaccarone, Susannah Cook, Maria de la Huerga, Esmé Fransen, Linda Ling Xuo,Rikard Jahge, Mohammad Lashin, Mohamad Alabdalla, Simona Andronaco andSiyona Ravi.

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